


Sweet Dreams and Flying Machines

by Zelos



Series: A Splintered Tomorrow [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Gen, Historical References, Historical discrimination, Prologue, World War II, pre-WWII
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-07
Updated: 2013-04-07
Packaged: 2017-12-07 17:36:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/751189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zelos/pseuds/Zelos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They were all, to a one, heroes in their own ways, and that was a much colder comfort than it really should have been.</p><p>How they all began.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sweet Dreams and Flying Machines

He grew up on the floor of an auto-shop, and iron and grease had been his toys; Howard Stark Sr. had been handy, but Junior had a _gift_. He grew up with oil on his hands and bolts between his teeth, learning the tools of the trade and how to handle that wrench. The Starks capitalized on America's industrial revolution with assembly lines and auto plants, made cars that ran twice as fast with half the maintenance; as the years went by, it became harder and harder to tell just which Stark was teaching whom.

The boy had a will of iron and a mind like a steel trap, and an almost-instant understanding of anything mechanical; his father once asked, jokingly, if metal spoke to him in the way that people spoke words.

Howard Stark, Jr., then a boy of barely 8 years, smiled skyward, his father's old service piece he'd been repairing still in his hands. He did not answer.

His father passed, and Junior took over the business, expanding from land, to sea, to sky. He built engines for cars and engines for planes; he had always loved the sky, limitless and clear and beautifully free. Howard designed no few planes himself, taught himself to conquer the sky (couldn't fix it or build it if you didn't know it inside out). Jet packs and flying cars and airplane wings and _so goddamn what_ if people laughed, waved it off as trivial toys? One day he'd revolutionize the world, turn it on its ear and back again. One day -

...one day, he'd heard about the war brewing overseas, word of corpses stripped for their shoes and good men sent to die, the fog of war darkening the skies and millions, _millions_ , gassed and shot and burned to death when they'd done nothing wrong but live.

Howard Stark Jr. promptly traded vehicles for weapons and peacetimes for war. He applied for the military contracts, even showcasing his jealously-guarded vibration-absorbent ore that he'd not only discovered, but figured out how to smelt; he was bitterly outraged when he'd _still_ lost, outbid and “too green” for the military officials to trust him for the field.

He was surprised when, after the dinner at Ciro's, a colonel from the US military offered him entry into the top-tiered SSR, no questions asked and to hell with the competition.

“You built that,” and Phillips punctuated that casually with a pistol shot to the discus against the wall. “That's all the bid I need.”

“Good choice, Colonel,” and even not-yet 30, Howard Stark (he'd be famous enough to drop the Jr.) has the drawl of a man who knew his worth. “I tell ya, I'm going to change the world.”

 

Bucky Barnes bit back the first, second, and fifteenth response that flashed through his head when Steve declared he wanted to join the army, stared hard at the sickly boy he'd come to thought of as family, looking ridiculous with his willowy frame and clenched fists.

“I'm _going_ , Buck,” Steve insisted, and Bucky pulled the pencil from Steve's grasp before he snapped it. “They'll be setting up the booths, have to be, I'm going to go enlist - ”

“Don't be stupid,” and Bucky'd meant that in kindness, but Steve still flinched; Bucky swallowed his sixteenth response, which was still a variant on the 'Mother of god, Steve, are you _insane?!_ ' except with infinitely more profanity.

“They'll be recruiting for weeks,” he said instead; there was no arguing with Steve Rogers when he got that damnable set to his chin. Steve could out-stubborn a mule, and out-stubborned all his aches and ills too over the years, for all the doctors had been predicting his death. “No need to rush. Listen, Steve – they won't take you like this. But,” he added, before Steve fired off another protest, “give it a few weeks – I'll teach you how to properly swing, run a couple of miles. They won't take ya if you'd hurt yourself breathing.” They'd never take him; Bucky'd personally kill the guy who would, because that'd be signing off on Steve's death sentence. Not that he'd tell Steve that.

Steve glared at him, but the set to his shoulders softened; after a moment, he hung his head and Bucky _hated_ that; Bucky had never looked _down_ at Steve for his heart trouble and fevers and pains but they had to be _realistic_. This wasn't a _game_ , for all Steve believed he could walk in.

 _The hell's wrong with collecting scraps_ , but at least he had mind enough to not say it aloud. A lot was wrong with collecting scraps if you're young and sturdy and _healthy_ , but Steve _wasn't_ , for all that he wasn't less.

He slung a hand over Steve's shoulder, pulled him away from the shouting paperboys.

“We'll enlist together. You'll make it in,” and he's lying through his teeth; he knew it, Steve knew it. Arms too short to box with god, but he'd still go down swinging.

Two hours later, he was teaching Steve to swing.

 

Bucky didn't get it. Steve didn't really expect him to.

For all Bucky'd seen him through fevers and pains that the doctors predicted would kill him _this time_ , Bucky'd never _got_ that Steve was living on borrowed time. To be fair, living through the myriad of ills Steve'd no right to survive may have coloured Bucky's perspective, but Steve never had expectations of living a long, long life. (And why would he want to, anyhow? Someone always had to keep an eye on him; first it was Ma, then the Sisters at the orphanage, and now Bucky when they're both too old to be orphans. But someday Bucky'd _leave_ and then there'd be no one there the next time his fevers spiked, and Steve doubted he'd last long if no one saw him seizing on the floor. Even if he did, that ain't no way to live.)

Steve had long since made peace with the idea that death could take him any minute, and no longer worried about the how or why or when; why was it so stupid (to use Bucky's words) to want to do something with his life, before it got snuffed out by the winds?

“Ya want a break?” Bucky was frowning; Steve waved him off and tried to breathe, the attempt at odds with the seizing in his chest.

“ _I can do this_ ,” he gasped out. He didn't meet Bucky's eyes.

 

Land of the free was a crock of shit, as far as Jim Morita was concerned.

His parents had given up their dreams for a shot at giving him his. Their homeland had been filled with increasing strife since restoring the Emperor to the throne, and his parents left before they no longer could, but this America was no land of dreams. Even before they'd arrived, Japanese children were already segregated into separate schools, like little black sheep.

Three years after his parents arrived, Japanese immigrants could no longer purchase land.

Two years before he was born, America banned Japanese immigrants outright.

His father and mother went from skilled labourers in the Emperor's land to begging for work, the Yellow Peril in full swing. They went hungry a lot...if they were lucky, that was all. It usually wasn't.

 _This_ was the land of dreams. Dreams, surrounded by people who thought them less than human?

Pearl Harbour was bombed, and America screamed her outrage and a call to arms. He was utterly indifferent.

Indifference became rage as his kinsmen were hunted like cattle, rounded up, and his parents shipped off to internment. Animals, they called them. Spies. Subhuman, _alien_. Didn't matter that they weren't military, hadn't a damn clue any more than white men. Didn't matter that they were mostly labourers and farmers and simple folk all, with husbands and wives and children. Didn't matter that they was just as _goddamned American_ as the rest of them – no, black hair and brown eyes were marks of sin; Lieutenant General DeWitt famously quoting “A Jap's a Jap”, and that was that.

“Go,” his mother told him a few months before she was taken. “You will be safer there.”

Safer, in the trenches, peppered with crossfire of bullets and the rumbling of tanks? Safer, in the front lines, ears ringing with blasts of shells and the screams of the dying and dead? _Safer?_

And still, she was right – at least he was free. Free to fight for a country he wasn't sure was worth saving.

“I'm from _Fresno_ , ace,” became his armour, dogtag and all, but born and bred in America meant nothing when you had black hair.

 

It was rare for children to go to school. Rarer still if the child was black. Gabe Jones was both, but he was hardly a rare sight at Howard University.

Lord knew where his Ma had the money – he suspected she didn't – but she just pushed him out the door regardless, “go learn, Gabe – learn things, do things.” Dark eyes shone, full lips set; she stared at him expectantly. “You show 'em we are people, too.”

He studied science, which he has no head for; he studied German, quit because it was too dry. French was no easier, but the girls were cuter, at least. Didn't much help his tests, though.

He had no idea what to study, no idea what to do; Ma expected him to change the world and some days he felt he could barely change his shoes. Maybe the white men were right, that they were all intellectually incapable, that all he'd amount to was –

 

“...nothing. Nothing to it, son,” the recruiter told him, tone somewhere between pity and a false kindness, leaked a little derisive scorn in the way he curled his lip. “Don't need books or fancy poetry lines,” _because what good would you be at that anyway_ “just good men up front. Our country is at stake.”

 

Some months and an eternity later, sometime between when Dugan noted with incredulity that he knew German and when he alone could converse with Dernier, Jones realized that of this ragtag bunch, he may be the most schooled of them all.

And they all follow a white man dressed in the flag who dropped out of school, this collection of ill-fed and ill-trained boys and young men; who gave a damn how many books they've read, so long as they shot straight and popped the right heads and had each other's backs?

These were his people, white, black and in between.

And if he, the foolish inept, ended up teaching the white man, the American hero, language and books, well...that was an irony he could keep.

 

When she was seven, Peggy's father taught her how to shoot, a welcome respite from her usual lessons of geography and embroidery and learning how to be the kind of mother and wife the Empire needed.

He took her to that big field out back with the bird-gun slung on his back and her little hand in his, taught her how to clean it, load it, and shoot it while she stared with solemn eyes. He helped her lift the gun while 'she' aimed the barrel, watched the shot scatter and her prize bird fall.

“Never aim at anything you don't mean to kill,” he told her, but – that first time – he did not let her see the remains.

(A gun was good that way. It did not leave the feeling of life dying in your hands.)

 

“Don't you dare – _don't you dare – !!_ ” her mother screamed; reached for her, missed.

Peggy thought of her father, throughout the years, always in front of her, big hands around her little ones, strong and safe and warm. She thought of her mother, working too long and late at the plant, staring out the window with a mixture of hope and dread. Thought of the weathered letter, its edges ragged and torn, written in a neat script that wasn't her father's. Thought of parchment stamped with the king's crest, of burnished six-pointed stars.

 _There will be no more letters_ ; she might've spoken aloud, but her mother did not hear.

“Goodbye, Mum,” Peggy said, and turned before she could change her mind.

 

Years later, when she was a woman and an agent and a survivor, when a handful of soldiers nursed the bruised hopes of nations, when she survived a hell where too few did, she remembered her father and the bird-gun, the scatter of shot against sky. Stared down the sight of her gun, her aim sure and strong, to a man fleeing, taking flight.

 _You turned us all into monsters,_ she squeezed the trigger, and the spray of crimson looked almost like feathers.

 

Timothy Dugan has always been a strong man. It was easy to tell why – at six foot (and three inches, if one included the hat) and 200 pounds of muscle, he had an easy claim for the circus strongman. He was a simple man, brave and clear of mind – 'Dum Dum' was meant to be insulting, but he never took it as such.

He was among the first wave to enlist, after Pearl Harbour; trapeze artists and elephants had no place in wartime, and they needed his strength – need _everyone's_ strengths, trained or untrained. This was war, and they each must serve.

They were hurried through Basic and hauled overseas, bayonets shoved into their hands – soldiers, now, when half of them never fired a shot in their lives. The recruiters told them about serving their country and battles of glory, ribbons and medals and decorated uniforms, _you will all be heroes_.

They didn't mention the shrieks as a screaming meemie sailed by, a Rhino instantly reduced to scraps. They didn't tell you about the terrifying, exhilarating relief, when you were lucky enough to walk (run) away from enemy fire. They didn't mention the decorations you earn would be purple hearts pinned to bedside pillows, blue stars traded for gold.

They didn't tell you about tripping over your own sergeant's body, dead or as good as, gutted through by a bayonet. Didn't tell you about the long, dark nights, of silence the sound of death. Didn't tell you how a dying man's speech bubbled with blood, yellowed teeth stained red.

“I hate soldiers,” the dying (dead) man rasped, and was that at the Krauts or them?

He watched the dead and dying around him, and felt very weak and small.

 

The brass tried – ineffectively, but tried. Morale was a fickle thing, in war. News (rumours) spread like wildfire, this saviour to the next, weapons back home that'd turn the tide, and it was anyone's guess whether the brass even believed it themselves. Some idiot called Captain America – _Captain America_ – was the next in a long line of claims, _he will save us all_.

“Behold – the American hero!” the radio jovially announced, and Dugan remembered warm tears streaking a cooling face, bloodied lips in the dark.

 

The explosion rocked the earth, turning the ground liquid beneath them; men stumbled and fell mid-step, blown clear off their feet. The air was filled with the shrieks of shrapnel and shrieks of men, still running as they fell.

James Montgomery Falsworth froze where he stood.

“ _Move, you fool!!_ ” his commander bellowed, blew past him like the winds.

“That was 17 seconds!” It was supposed to be _20_ ; Wright had told him a million times.

“ _He's already dead!_ ” And he was right, he _must_ be right, but Falsworth turned anyway and ran straight for the gout of smoke and flame.

 

Wright was unsurprisingly hard to find, a body amongst many, charred and burned and limbs strewn about. Literally so – his left leg and half his left arm were just _gone_ , the flesh cauterized by the blast. The air hung thick with the smell of vapourized fat, acrid and nauseatingly sweet.

He flipped the body over, the uniform disturbingly hot. There were small embers dancing in Wright's singed hair; he patted them out. Wright twitched slightly under his hands – did he imagine it? No, no, he didn't, one eye cracked open a slit, the cornea just beginning to haze.

God above, he was still _alive_.

“Hey,” he began, knowing it was futile. The burns alone would kill him, never mind the missing limbs.

No answer, but he didn't expect one. Falsworth threw the remaining limb over his shoulder in a macabre attempt at a fireman's carry; there was nothing left to save, but maybe, at least, his body –

A whistle of a shot overhead; he swung about, the body dropping to the ground like the dead weight it was. The Fritzes were back and advancing; of course they were. This was supposed to be a surgical strike, in and out, take out a few tanks on the way. It wasn't meant to whittle their numbers, to keep them back for any length of time.

He knelt down to the body again, watched the bare twitches of waning life, mind raced furiously for an end he knew would come.

_He's already dead._

Falsworth stared down at his hands, soot-black and battle-scarred, scraped raw and covered with blood.

What's one more?

He reached around the dead man's head, grasped the base of his neck. A pause, a sharp twist, a sickening snap. And then he was up and running again, ghosting into the cover of trees and the glut of smoke, billowing thick and low. Tears stung his eyes; it was the smoke.

If he lived a hundred years, if he lived past this war, he would never forget the smell of burning flesh.

 

A sharp gesture from the commander, and they all fanned out. Men peered under crumbled overhangs and collapsed walls, searched ramshackle buildings left standing. No stone was left unturned; not a rat escaped the search. Couldn't let the Germans take the city again for some stragglers left behind.

Dernier found the man under a half-crumbled wall – a boy, rather; didn't look a day over 16. Blond-haired and blue-eyed, the very picture of the German's perfect specimen, had his face not been scrunched in agony. Blood poured out from under his hands, bloomed roses on his front.

The boy's livid face blanched further as he approached, shrieked something he didn't understand. He summarily ignored him, knelt down, checked his wounds. Four shots, at least two fatal, not counting being crushed by a wall.

He paused, weighing his options. Waste of a bullet, to let him go easy. He didn't deserve that much. Snap his neck? Smother his face? It would be simple enough.

Jacques Dernier was not afraid of blood. He'd grown accustomed to it, with a farmer father who occasionally shot his own game. From a young age, he'd helped his father clean the animals, skinned and gutted and cut off limbs. He'd learned to divorce animals from humans long ago, to distance himself from the act of killing.

Humans were animals too (just _better_ ), and kill to eat like any other; he would not think to harm a man/woman/child, but survival was not sin. Animals, however, were not human, just...meat.

Three weeks on the battlefield and he'd begun thinking of people as just meat too. Three months on the battlefield and it was hard to remember anything else, blood and terror and battle a permanent stain; it was easier this way, when he rammed a knife into a German's throat, warm blood splashing on cold, cold hands. Less sinful. Easier to face himself at the end of the day, at the blood he imagined he'd never wash out.

...he was just a boy.

Dernier wondered what he'd been told, to get him to enlist. Wondered if the propaganda was the same on both sides, glory and honour and death to us all.

A flicker of movement. The boy, satisfied that he wasn't about to immediately die, had turned his head slightly to look at him, face slackening in the final breaths. He whimpered something Dernier didn't understand. Didn't have to, really; he'd heard enough from his own comrades, what they all said at the end of days: _I don't want to die._

No one wanted to. Their job was not to die for their country, but to make sure the enemy died for his.

Dernier cast a brief glance around. Not a Frenchman in sight, too busy with their own searches. He shook his head, “ _Que Dieu nous pardonne._ ”

He knelt there in the lengthening shadows until the dying boy stilled. Dernier held his hand.

 

Those big black shoes plunked down on his bench, and he gathered his rags and tins. He dared to glance up and immediately winced: cut trousers, pressed to perfection, stars and chevrons he couldn't identify. An officer on leave, perhaps? He quickly reached for the smaller tin, the one with the good lampblack, and –

“The hell are you doing?”

“I – hey!!” The officer grabbed a fistful of his shirt, then just as quickly released him, looking ever so slightly chagrined; he glared back, belligerent and afraid.

“Sorry,” the man admitted. Then, “what's your name, son?”

“Hodge. Sir.” The latter word was reluctant. “Gilmore Hodge.”

“Hodge. The hell are you still doing here?” The officer leaned in a little closer. “We need you up front.”

“I...” He couldn't admit that he'd ran away from the farm because he couldn't stand the work, couldn't admit that he'd gotten booted from the plant because they found out he stole some money. Certainly he couldn't admit that he'd never gotten another factory job since, with the womenfolk steadily moving in, encroaching on the men's jobs.

“You'll never amount to anything,” the woman who'd taken his job had taunted. Willowy little thing; he'd have slapped her silly for it if she hadn't been rescued by the men.

“Better than your work?” Which wasn't quite the truth, but close enough. “Ain't no better work than serving your country, son. Good men around and behind you, three square meals a day, fighting for a cause bigger than yourself. Yeah, tough work, but not too tough for a good, young, strong man like you.” His face darkened slightly. “And if you ain't convinced by your country, be convinced by the Japs. Wretched bastards – if they're not killing our men, they're turning them into slaves.”

“I...” He'd heard about Pearl Habour, of course; who hadn't? Didn't mean he was ready to go up front.

“Come along, son,” like his enlistment was a foregone conclusion; the officer pulled him to his feet and dragged him away, heedless of the half-shined shoe and the rags and tins left behind.

Hodge put up a token protest, but his heart wasn't in it.

He still may never amount to anything, but he learned to salute the flag.

 

“ _Were any of you on the Pyawbwe slope, and lived to tell the tale? Well, if you were, at this time I don't mind.”_

They were all, to a one, heroes in their own ways, and that was a much colder comfort than it really should have been.

**Author's Note:**

> I really wish I'd written this series in order, but so it goes...
> 
> Vocabs:
> 
> Parchment with the king's crest - Memorial Scroll. This, and its plaque, honoured British soldiers who'd died during service.  
> Six pointed star – the 1939-1945 Star, honouring British soldiers who'd served in WWII. (The Atlantic Star is also six-pointed, but not the one I was referring to.)  
> Screaming meemie – nickname for a particular kind of German rocket, named for its screech. Destructive, but with poor aim.  
> Rhinos – tanks welded with scrap metal in front to sever trees/undergrowth to aid movement.  
> Que Dieu nous pardonne - "May God forgive us"
> 
> Steve enlisted very late because of his frailty, but those of sound health (ie. Everyone else) would likely have enlisted much earlier according to when their countries went to war. I kept Falsworth and Dernier in their respective armies, since Dernier didn't seem to speak a lick of English and thus was unlikely part of the American army.
> 
> Gabe Jones mentioned in CA:TFA that he spent “three semesters [of German] at Howard, switched to French, girls were cuter”. There are far too many American schools named Howard, but Howard University has a long history and a nonsectarian outlook, so I figured it was the most likely.
> 
> In Captain America: First Vengeance (the tie-in comic), Howard showcased vibranium to military officials but also initially turned down SSR's invitation to join them. I don't think this story is an outright contradiction, as seeking a contract with the military is different than working directly with the SSR and its projects/inherent danger. Other details, such as Bucky and Steve being art students, Bucky teaching Steve to box, and Howard and Steve being friends were taken from CA:FV.
> 
> Tony's grandfather's name (Howard Stark Sr.) is taken from comic lore, as is Dum Dum Dugan's prior occupation as a circus strongman.


End file.
